The present invention relates to high-frame rate cameras and more particularly to a high-frame rate compact electronic camera integrated into a compact and fully integrated high-frame rate image acquisition and motion analysis system with a modular and expandable structure.
It is known that there are:on the market high-frame rate cameras having a structure with separate units for each building block, namely, camera head with an image sensor; cables for analog and video output signals; controller-storage unit (electronic memory, magnetic tape memory) on a separate hand truck; local control panel; and standard video monitor with no data reduction and no user selectable image processing. A number of U.S. patents are known relating to video cameras, such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,212,034; 4,280,141; 4,322,638; 4,330,796; 4,496,995; 4,694,220; 4,851,914; 4,970,597; 5,157,499; 5,227,888; 5,278,657 and 5,298,734 which deal primarily with various types of CCD (charged-coupled device) cameras which are related to only a small part of the high-frame rate image acquisition and motion analysis system of the present application. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,172,234; 5,251,036; 5,253,064; 5,301,026; 5,313,306; 5,331,411; 5,339,105; 5,374,995 and 5,376,963 all teach the processing of output data from an imager on digital basis.
With regard to the above cited patents none of these patents disclose analog processing of the analog output of an imager. Rather, each of the later group of patents teach processing the output signals of the imager on a digital basis, in other words, the analog signal at the output of the imager is converted to a digital signal before processing. In addition, none of these patents disclose a high-frame rate camera with integrated image acquisition and motion analysis software.